Of Interest

Monday, April 28, 2014

The
Leonardo Express rumbles from Rome’s airport right to the city center.
After 32 minutes, it arrives at its final destination, Termini, the
city’s central station. An ad in a pedestrian tunnel at the station
reads, “Roma Termini — a Place to Live.” Some have taken the message
quite literally.

It’s 11:10 p.m. Stranded
people from around the world are wrapped up in their sleeping bags as
they lay in front of the exit on the north side of the station. On some
nights, up to a hundred homeless huddle together like freezing people in
front of a fire. Many of those who sleep here are African refugees.

During
the daytime, Roma from Romania represent the majority in and around the
station. Left largely unchecked by the local authorities, they
aggresively try to squeeze money out of foreign tourists.

A
comment by one British tourist recently got posted on the Facebook page
of Ignazio Marino, who became the city’s mayor in June. The tourist
said she had never before experienced “a more wretched hive of scum and
villainy” than when she arrived in Rome by train. For safety reasons,
she wrote, it is advisable to “spend as little time as possible” at
Termini.

Marino takes criticism seriously,
but also in a sporting manner. As he sits at his desk in Rome’s Palace
of the Senate on Capitoline Hill, a building once remodeled by
Michelangelo, he exudes the aura of a man at peace with himself. Two
months ago, he was still cursing his opponents who, he says, wanted to
let the Eternal City go up in flames just as Emperor Nero did. At the
time, Marino made clear that he wasn’t prepared to play the role of the
“capital city’s liquidator-in-chief.”

What
had happened? Rome was on the verge of bankruptcy and the mayor said the
only way to possibly rescue the city would be for the national
government to jump in with emergency aid to the tune of €600 million
($829 million) within 24 hours. Marino got his wish and the city didn’t
go up in flames. Standing beneath a photo that shows him in an intimate
embrace with Pope Francis, the mayor now says he wants to move forward.
After all, he adds, “spotlights from around the world will be shining on
Rome” on April 27, and 2 billion people will be watching on their
televisions.

On Sunday, the two most popular
popes of the 20th century — John XXIII and John Paul II — are to be
canonized on St. Peter’s Square by Pope Francis. Catholic pilgrims from
around the world plan to attend, and hotels in the capital city are almost entirely booked out.

For
at a short time at least, Romans will be “able to dream of living in a
truly European city,” because the metro, for once, will finally operate
at night to help accommodate the expected 3 million visitors, the local
citizen’s advocacy group Residents of the Historical Center notes
caustically.

The old Roman establishment
feel they are being ignored by politicians and that they have been
forced to look on powerlessly as one fast food restaurant or bed and
breakfast after the other has replaced the last remaining artisan shops
in the heart of the city.

More than 12
million tourists visited Rome last year, and this despite the fact that
the city once known as Caput mundi, or the capital of the ancient world,
has since lost much of its splendor. That, at least, is what many
residents say.

Novelist Mauro Evangelisti
warns visitors, like the pilgrims who are about to descend upon his
city, that they must brace themselves for “an old airport, crooked cab
drivers, swindlers, pickpockets” and streets full of potholes like in
Havana. In an open letter published prior to the last municipal
election, 21 Roman intellectuals lamented what they saw as signs of the
city’s downfall and “cultural gloom”.

Meanwhile, Carlo Verdone, one of the leading actors in the movie
that took this year’s honor for Best Foreign Picture at the Oscars,
“The Great Beauty,” even goes so far as to describe his city as a true
to scale likeness of a “totally failed country.”

Matteo
Renzi, Italy’s new prime minister, is now calling for radical reforms.
Since it narrowly averted insolvency at the end of February, the capital
city has, to a certain extent, been under the yoke of the national
government and the mayor has been ordered to undertake draconian
austerity measures. This is the last remaining opportunity for turning
the city around, Renzi’s state secretary for the economy recently said.
Rome, he said, should become a shining example for the rest of Italy to
follow.

But where to begin? Upon their
arrival, the first thing some pilgrims to Rome will see is a
five-and-a-half-meter (18 foot) tall bronze statue of Pope John Paul II.
In what appears to have been wise foresight, the former leader of the
Catholic Church has his back turned to the station forecourt, which is
littered with drug addicts’ syringes and grocery store shopping carts
that homeless people have filled to the brim.

A
wiry, bald-headed man walks right through the turmoil on a recent
morning and says, “The first thing that needs to be done is for the city
to reconquer its public spaces. There is not a single street left in
the entire city where you have the feeling you’re in Europe — I mean,
where everything works as it should.”...